I source housings from thrift stores mostly, though my good friend and ...worms bandmate scott sloan recently agreed to make a few wooden boxes for me in exchange for one of them being filled with noises.
I've taken delivery of one box so far and it has become the Chro-Magnum, an LED actuated poly-drone composer. It combines a light-to-frequency converter with 4 different color LEDs, all of them with variable rate and intensity controls. The Chro-Magnum takes advatage of the fact that the light-to-frequency chip has photodiode arrays that react to 4 different colors: red, blue, green and clear (full spectrum). The coolest part is that different colors create different tones. Musically, this means that 4 flashing LEDs become a juggernaught of poly-rhythmic tones. Pretty fucking cool, if you'll excuse the use of curse words for emphasis, but seriously, it's pretty f'n cool sounding.
The Chro-Magnum also has 2 variable full range on-board square wave oscillators, wired out of phase with each other to give the player a myriad of tone options, most inerestingly a ring-modulator esque tone sweep that plays nicely with the under or overlying polyrhythms. Photos and video coming in the next week or so, as I ramp this here blog up into the stratosphere.
